Those of you who do your own powder coating….

[tkent02]

I also talked some of them into texture rather than smooth finish to hide the imperfections I could not fix

I need to do some of this, black wrinkle finish or something. Any powder you can reccommend that covers up imperfect parts well?

I did these little parts in a toaster oven, could have been too hot locally.

I will strongly disagree with what that shop told you Gatekeeper...Prep is very important, but there so many other factors involved.
Humidity, ambient temp, age of the powder, proper powder storage, equipment condition, metallurgy and so many more

Well I am sure if your going to use crap that is out of date or old or cheap, or it's **** pouring rain and you have the doors open, and your posder is contaminated, and so on.....I believe it will turn out like crap.....

but if all else is new and ready to go, as is with the OP, he don't have old stuff, heck he just got into this....so it's still new products, I can only assume it would come down to prep.....

not seeing his whole operation and his oven and such it's hard to really say for sure, I know the place that did my rims, the oven was big enough you could walk into it, does that help ? probably as I am sure nothing is anywhere near a heating element, then again the place does an entire car chasis and or a crap load of parts at once.

All I can say is I brought the rims to them sandblasted, I also used paint stripper to clean what I could, the rims were nothing but bare aluminum and he still said he needs to blast them and chemically clean them to ensure he does not have to do the powder coating twice.

I found one flaw on the rims, it seems a little less powder was on the one spot, but that is about it.....

as you say it can be dozen's of things to cause a failure.....

.

I will strongly disagree with what that shop told you Gatekeeper...Prep is very important, but there so many other factors involved.
Humidity, ambient temp, age of the powder, proper powder storage, equipment condition, metallurgy and so many more

Believe me I've experienced it all!

tkent02...without actually watching what you did ...I would almost have to say that the black pieces in that 1 pic got burned...not over cured , just too hot or to close to the element (if it was an electric stove) just guessing
I do see some out gassing which would be consistent with older metal.
but the cure for that is not simple ...it's a trial and error thing.

I've had to tell people that "there is now way I can coat that part"
It would just be too expensive for you to have me do it 5, 10 or however many times it would take before it finally stopped gassing out
(believe me I hated saying I couldn't do it)
In the short run it would be cheaper for them to get it painted and I'll powder what I can.

I also talked some of them into texture rather than smooth finish to hide the imperfections I could not fix


Here's a link to the shop I worked at...if you go into the gallery you'll see some of the stuff we did...(I'm the guy directly behind the race car frame in the middle of the pic) and on the far right sitting on the old flatbed truck (we coated pieces on that also)

http://www.suracopowdercoating.com/

[tkent02]

Maybe, and some of these weren't prepped all that well, but others were. Some of the ones that were really clean and smooth looked like crap too.

so I wonder what is different on what the shops do, my rims were done, I stripped all the old paint, they sandblasted them and did a chemical clean as well, phosphate or something like that, and then powder coated them inside and out....




I was told it all comes down to the prep and nothing else....

.

[tkent02]

The Gloss black sucks. Even on good clean smooth parts can't get a good finish, most of it looks like ****, and they all look different.



Back to matte and wrinkle finishes for me. Time to see if paint remover takes this stuff off so I can start over.

[tkent02]

Which color did you use? I noticed there were no less than 6 black options : vtwin, powder, wrinkle, mirror, satin, high gloss.

I only bought one from Eastwood, the Gloss Black. The matte black and the red I've been using are just the cheap Harbor Freight stuff.

The gloss black looks nice where the surface is perfect, it just shows any imperfections really well.

The Matte covers most things even on fairly poor surfaces. I experimented on some junk parts, not preparing the surface much, it actually did pretty good. The gloss not so much.

Which color did you select in your kit

Which color did you use? I noticed there were no less than 6 black options : vtwin, powder, wrinkle, mirror, satin, high gloss.

[tkent02]

No, I haven't tried it yet. I think that's next. Hopefully it works well on messed up surfaces. Seems like it would hide most anything.

Anything gloss is harder than matte.Be a bit before I can get it but I'm sure it will be handy for all the black I have on the GPz.Tried the wrinkle finish?Some on the GPz I'd like to refinish.

[tkent02]

Go for it. I'm having a lot of fun with it.

Gloss is a lot harder than Matte.

Thanks to this thread I'm looking hard at getting one of these PC guns.Tool place locally has then for less than I could bring it in from the US.Thanks tkent02

No problem...always willing to ramble on about something I actually know something about

[tkent02]

I think, since this engine is going in an old Jeep, and the only person who will ever see it is me right before I spill oil on it, that good enough is good enough. It looks better than it did.

Thanks for the advice.

Over curing can be a bad thing, but it mostly pertains to to high of a temp or leaving the part in way longer at temp than what is called for full cure.
What I use to do if I was on the fence about cure,
is to scuff the part that has been cured (green scuff pad works great) only do the black as much as you can.
Blow it off with air and do the whole in hot oven for few minutes thing (let cool)
Then you can shoot the black again.